This
volume consists of four essays originally presented as public lectures
along with fourteen pages of questions from the audience and answers.
The first study is Donald B. Redford's analysis of the religious
reforms introduced to fourteenth century B.C. Egypt by the pharaoh who
came to be known as Akhenaten. Redford considers the contribution of
his own excavations at Thebes to understanding the Amarna revolution.
It was, in its time, a disenfranchisement of other gods and their
temples in Egypt and the development of a single deity, the Aten, as
the one who was worshipped by the royal family and others throughout
Egypt. According to Redford, Akhenaten was a monotheist who displayed
characteristic intolerance of other deities and privileged his own god
as alone the creator deity and alone worthy of worship. However, any
connection with Moses and the emergence of monotheism in the religion
of Israel is discounted. Redford's presentation is the only one in the
book that has no documentation or footnotes. Therefore, his assertions
are presented without substantiation of a sort that is necessary for
evaluation.

William Dever provides an important survey of
extrabiblical archaeological (and some written) evidence of religion in
Iron Age Israel between 1200 and 586 B.C. His study is a valuable
survey of the field from the perspective of a leading Syro-Palestinian
archaeologist. It argues the importance of the extrabiblical evidence
for understanding the popular religion of Israel and Dever focuses on a
variety of items that have been excavated and associated with Israelite
religion but do not appear in the Old Testament. Dozens of terra cotta
offering stands and small horned altars have been excavated west of the
Jordan but neither are mentioned in the Bible. Again, the evidence for
the prominence of Asherah, both in the hundreds of figurines and in the
inscriptions that suggest her association with Yahweh, indicate the
importance of this goddess that is only hinted at in the Bible. Dever
makes an important case for the importance of archaeology. His essay is
the best in the volume insofar as it presents a great deal of carefully
evaluated evidence with little speculation. However, his absence of
evaluation of the personal names is a serious lack for someone who
attempts to address the question of folk religion in ancient Israel.
The article is a pleasant surprise insofar as it relationship to the
title of the book is incidental at best.

Kyle McCarter begins
by setting the reforms of Hezekiah and Josiah in the context of the
reform of the seventh century pharaoh Shabaka, who also discovered an
ancient text and attempted to base reforms on it. His survey of such
evidence as Hezekiah's wall, the Arad sanctuary, the Kuntillet Ajrud
inscriptions and sanctuary, and Mesopotamian texts that suggest a
movement toward a single deity from the many all interact with biblical
texts. However, his evidence that other nations surrounding Israel and
Judah were similar in their worship of a single national deity does not
stand up to the evidence. First, by McCarter's own admission he must
exclude the Phoenician states since they clearly worshipped multiple
deities. Second, his evidence for nations east and south of Judah does
no hold up under close scrutiny. For one thing, in most of these the
evidence of the personal names is too small to make serious conclusion
from the deities mentioned therein. For another, the Ammonite corpus
shows examples of many different divine names within its onomastica,
unlike the personal names (biblical and extrabiblical) in Judah and
even Israel. The fact is that the evidence from nations such as Edom is
ambiguous and open to various interpretations, as even Dever suggests
(p. 116).

John J. Collins provides an overview of some of the
most important intertestamental texts that attest to the presence of
other semi-divine or even divine beings in the worldview of Judaism.
Therefore, he suggests that many of the statement made in the gospel of
John regarding Jesus' divinity would have been acceptable in the larger
Jewish context of first century Palestine. However, some claims, such
as "I and the Father are one," have no parallel.

On the whole
the volume is well written, accessible for the general reader, and as
good an introduction to the religion of ancient Israel (rather than
specifically monotheism) as any.